"That being said I rarely call tech support for anything other then my ISP is broken."
Same here, but here's my experience:
Me: My internet access breaks at your routers. Can you fix the problem?
DirecWay: What operating system are you using? Let's check your settings.
Me: It's not my operating system. Your routers are dead.
DirecWay: What operating system are you using? Let's check your settings.
Me: It's not my....-sigh-...fine....Mandrake Linux.
DirecWay: What's that?
Me: It's an operating system.
DirecWay: I'm sorry, we only support Windows [many versions]. We can't help you with other operating systems.
Me: It's not my operating....-sigh-....fine, hold on while I [pretend to] switch to Windows [some arbitrary version I don't have].
DirecWay: [pretending to guide me through something useful, and me pretending to follow through on my phantom Windows computer].
Me: [after a lot of wasted time]. See, there is nothing wrong with my computer.
DirecWay: [after putting me on hold for ten minutes] Our senior technicians have determined that our routers are malfunctioning. They should be back online shortly.
"Please name an application in which compositing gives a better user interface than tabs or just overlapping windows."
That's easy. I created a visual database schema designer which has a table search function (columns too, but no need to go into details) that brings up a non-modal window with all the possible matches in a tabular format. Clicking on one of the items in the list causes the corresponding table to center on screen and flash a few times. If the table centers behind the results window, then the table is hidden and the flashing can't be seen. A translucent results window would solve that problem better than anything else.
I agree with you that these movies were bad (not the worst, but just bad):
The Cat In The Hat
Practical Magic
Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle
I haven't seen many of the movies on your list, so I won't comment on those.
Batman & Robin may have been cheesy, but it wasn't even remotely close to the worst movie ever.
The honor for the worst movie I've ever paid to see (and that was a rental, but they still should have paid me for the pain they induced by agreeing to let me see it), and may qualify for the single worst movie ever (Gigli can't hold a candle to it) is The Blair Witch Project.
Never has so much mindless, blaring (rhyming pun intended), exruciating, horrendously unnecessary mental pain been inflicted upon a living consciousness by another.
During either the DeCSS suit, the DMCA hearings, or a RIAA/MPAA suit (I can't remember which), the court specifically ruled that computers were not playback and recording devices and thus did not fall into the realm of protected devices for fair use copying.
Either computers are not such devices as the court ruling indicated, and thus this money grab is illegal, or computers are such devices and thus protected by fair use copying exemptions to the chagrin of the RIAA/MPAA.
I know I'm going to get modded down for this, but I have karma to burn.
Mr. Brown is an adult, I presume. As an adult, he is capable of reading and comprehending the basic language that appears in employment agreements. If he is at all familiar with the I.T. field, then he is probably also aware that many employment contracts include a clause that says all ideas and products created by employees while employed at the company become the property of the employer.
Mr. Brown willingly signed this contract, presumably because he wanted the money the company was offering in exchange for his agreement. Being a consenting adult means that he has to abide by the agreement, for better or for worse. The company presumably upheld its part of the bargain by paying Mr. Brown what was promised to him.
As much as I sympathize with his situation, he knew what he was getting into when he signed that contract. Now he needs to be responsible for his actions.
In addition, I really can't believe how little sense this guy has. When the company threatened to sue him, he should have just agreed to describe his idea but then described it wrong. When his employer pointed out that the idea couldn't possibly work, he could have just looked shocked like he suddenly realized how much time he wasted on a failed idea.
Moreso, he should have just kept his mouth shut. If the entrepeneurs in the Slashdot crowd learn anything from this, understand that loose lips sink ships. If you have a great idea from which you intend to profit in the future, keep it to yourself. How many times do people have to be told this for it to sink in?
I understand, as a developer, the desire to share strokes of brilliance with other people. As a businessman (sole proprietorship), I also understand the even greater need for discretion and personal responsibility.
"The guy knew his boss fucked around on the computer all day...."
This really tickled my funnybone, as you seem to misunderstand the nature of the supervisor-subordinate relationship. Allow me to clarify:
The supervisor tells the subordinate what is acceptable computer use, not the other way around -- regardless of what is contained in the policy manual.
If the policy manual says that no games shall be played on the computers, then you (the subordinate) don't play games on the computers. If your boss is playing games on the computers, and tells you to fuck off since he's your boss and doesn't have to give a shit about your whiney-ass opinion of his breach of policy, then you do as you're told (and document it for later use).
If you still feel the need to poke your nose into your boss's activities, then you start complaining up the chain of command and documenting everything you do.
If all this still doesn't bring down painful retribution upon your supervisor, then you just live with it and go back to doing your job. Just to be clear about it, installing spyware on your boss's computer is not part of your job.
Authority to do this stuff flows from your boss (or his bosses) down to you. Remember, your boss does not get his power to rule from the people he rules. He gets his power from his bosses, all the way up the chain to the elected office holders (since this story is about State offices, this holds true). Only the top of the chain is empowered by the people s/he governs.
This guy was a moron for not knowing when to stop. His actions were defensible only up to the point where he tried to reverse the chain of authority and to be his boss's boss.
"If somebody said something similar of IE there would be a unanimous uproar of upbraids from the slashdot community against whoever said it."
Yep, you are absolutely right. We would be blasting IE from every (virtual) rooftop.
That this bug was hidden away in the Bugzilla annals for over 4 years as Confidential is really intolerable. It reeks of trying to sweep an embarassing problem under the rug, which is the complete antithesis of Open Source development.
One of my coworkers who recently defected from I.E. to Firefox stated, upon the last Firefox vulnerability, that if he had to frequently upgrade his Firefox because of security issues, he may as well just stay with IE. And he unfortunately has a valid point.
If a person, or group, can't be mature enough to admit a big, "oops, I/we made a really big design mistake. We'll fix it because many people are depending on us," then that person or group has no business working on such a fundamentally important piece of software as a web browser.
A workable solution to this kind of problem has been around for many years. Java applets, when run from appletviewer, display a very prominent notice telling the user that very thing.
I hate Javascript with a passion, and disable it except for those crucial sites (broken as they are) that will not work without it. But for those sites, it's just common sense for the browser to to inform the user from within all Javascript popup windows that the window is a result of Javascript.
Actually, every user interface that is not a built-in part of the application should contain an unremovable notice (ala appletviewer) to make user interface spoofing (a very well known security risk) unworkable.
"...the first time one of these smarmy nerds gets his ass handed to him by a pissed-off criminal, I'll definitely be feeling the urge to laugh a bit..."
Please, Brother Kothapalli Rao, don't be to upset. I am Father Dumb'en'dumber, and I have no idea what you're talking about.
That's all fine, but that isn't what he was asking. He was asking what makes the deb package format supposedly superior to the RPM package format.
Distribution policy, package availability, and the software the manipulates the packages have nothing to do with the package format's superiority or inferiority.
"If you recommend purchasing a computer that requires only half the support of the machine it is replacing, aren't you putting your job in danger? Exactly."
I usually agree with Cringely, but he's way off here. If you replace Windows with something requires half the support, you free resources to provide new and improved services in other areas.
Cringely is assuming that there is a fixed amount of services and support that can ever exist, and that IT departments have reached that peak. I can understand his error since when you're running Windows, you will never have the time or manpower to exceed a very minimal standard of services. You're so busy cleaning up after Windows when it shits all over itself and your data that improving the departmental offerings isn't even an option.
I talked my boss (actually Windows did the honor all by itself) into replacing Windows/IIS/ASP (which is all that dual-processor box did -- serve web pages) with Linux/Apache/PHP when Windows died for the millionth time, and the results were an eye-opener for the entire department. The Windows box pegged both processors at 100% after only a few simultaneous users connected to the web site, while the Linux box will sit largely idle with 50 or so simultaneous web connections).
Uptimes measured in hours under Windows turned (on the exact same, unmodified hardware) into 11 months (which is when the network card fried) under Linux.
I later added samba for file and print serving, and a PostgreSQL database for a variety of web related activities.
The former Windows web server required two of us programmers (because the techs are always busy fixing Windows problems) to babysit on an almost continuous basis. I now manage the web server (and two other highly utilized Linux servers) myself whenever I get a free couple minutes.
My time has since been spent creating new software services for my 600 internal users and the thousands of visitors that visit our web site every day.
My point is that there will -always- be higher levels of services that a department can offer when its people are not buried under trivial nonsense like constantly changing baby Windows' diaper.
"This is not a Microsoft exploit, just a trojan that targets MS products."
That isn't the best logic I've ever read.
The trojan worm (new term, I know; get over it) targets a Microsoft application, which encourages malware distribution through a well known entry vector caused by a well known defective Microsoft design, running on a Microsoft operating system. How exactly is this not a Microsoft exploit?
1) Back when I was running Win95, a Thanksgiving day virus wrote German gibberish into my FAT table. The silver lining is that was the day I switched to Linux.
2) The standard rm party. I thought I was one directory level higher (in a temp directory) than I was. "rm -rf *" from / instead of from/temp.
3) Second day on my new job programming in county I.S. for a truly aweful database called UniVerse (which I had never heard of before).
UniVerse calls directories "files" and calls files "records". I, having referred to files as "files" for so many years, maintaining the industry standard references of files being files (and not directories), that I always got the references confused. All database "records" in UniVerse are stored under "files". To delete a UniVerse "record", you type "delete [UniVerse_file] [UniVerse_record]". That deletes the file from the subdirectory.
UniVerse also has a command called "delete.file", which deletes entire directories (where databases live).
I had lost track of the difference between the two, typed "delete bp [some_record]" (the bp directory is where the jail database lived), and thought I had deleted the database. I immediately told my supervisor that I thought I just deleted the entire jail database. He assured me I didn't, and that we had backups of everything anyway, so I kept working.
Not more than ten seconds later, I type "delete.file bp [some_record]". I once again immediately went to my supervisor, who was talking to the department director, and told him what I had done and that I thought I had deleted the database.
"Yep," he confirmed, "it's gone. It'll take a couple hours to restore from tape."
About a half hour later, he came to my desk and told me he just found out that backups had been failing for the last month. Everything was gone.
I naturally thought it was time to once again start passing out the resumes. Since that was the highest paying job I'd ever had that I didn't hate, and was only my second job out of college, I was devastated at the prospect that I had lost it on only my second day. I could feel the tears welling up, and I could have burst out crying if I'd had just a little less self control.
I forgot to tell you that a brand new county jail was finishing construction, and this software had to go live in the near future (I can't remember the exact timeline).
That's when the director told me a couple things:
1) They had only been writing code for the new system for two days. The changes were modifications to a 3rd party package, so it would only take a couple days to get back on track.
2) Shit happens, don't worry about it.
3) "I bet you'll never make that mistake again." (truer words have never been spoken).
4) You fucked it up, so you fix this part of it (my first major assignment, small as it was, in a system I had never seen before).
The system went online as scheduled, I kept my job, everything worked out. Part of the reason I kept my job was because of my honesty in immediately bringing my mistake to their attention rather than making them hunt down the problem. Apparently my predecessor would always deny everything, even when the evidence of fault was conclusive. Another part is that I worked under one of the coolest department directors ever.
As an aside, I spun the situation into my having done the department a favor. "Without me, you may not have found out about the defective backups until something crucial had been lost. I uncovered the problem early.":)
"4. Taking over an NT domain accidentally by running samba as a PDC"
I had forgotten to turn off Samba when I installed one of our first Linux servers onto our then all-Windows network. It took a while to figure out why things had changed and started working reliably.
Samba has been handling our Windows networking ever since.
Gates told journalists that Microsoft's patching process compares well with competitors'. "You know, the time -- the average time -- to fix on an operating system other than Windows is typically ninety to a hundred days," said Gates. "Today we have that down to less than forty-eight hours."
And in a matter of only a few years after that, Microsoft releases the fix that fixes the things the original fix breaks.
"Witches were herbalists, spiritualists, natural healers, and all around wise women. They do not, and have never consorted with the devil."
The original poster wasn't claiming this. He was listing a bunch of bogus arguments used by oppressors to justify their oppression, which he points out after the list.
Here's the really aggravating part: for $93M, I can put together a team of 100 (programmers, artists, technical writers, etc) dedicated to nothing but getting a fully functional, 100% customized to Stanford's business flow requirements, ERP system written and debugged in under a year. Each person would walk away with enough money to be very well off for quite a long time.
Whomever spent this much money with nothing to show should be dragged through the streets by rabid horses; and then bad things should happen to him.
Given Shakespeare's rampant lawyer bashing in his plays, I'm highly doubtful he completely changed his tune for this one quote.
The quote was given in the play as a description of the ideal community if one were king. Part of that ideal is to kill all the lawyers.
It was hardly a flattering remark about lawyers being some type of defenders of justice. It was just the opposite: lawyers cause the injustice, and getting rid of them would return justice.
As others have pointed out, KDE and GNOME are heavier because most users have demanded extra heavyweight features. KDE has gotten lighter and more featureful between 3.1 and 3.2 (and I understand GNOME has had similar trimming). Mandrake 10.0 with KDE 3.2 runs better on my laptop than Mandrake 9.1 and KDE 3.1. Application startup time is better and resource usage is down.
For those of you who don't want all the extra goodies provided by KDE or GNOME, at least some distributions (Mandrake and Redhat that I use myself) provide a handy desktop switching tool that lets you easily switch to a lightweight (with correspondingly fewer features) window manager.
I make good use of KDE features, especially with Konqueror. I am endlessly frustrated by the user hostility of Microsoft Windows (and others) when I can't split the file manager into multiple panes for easy manipulation of files across directories and other networked computers within the same window.
That by itself is a killer feature that I am loathe to have unavailable.
I don't know of anyone who claims that KDE or GNOME are snappier desktops than Windows desktops, as that is easily disproved (but only if you're talking about application startup time).
Raw X11 apps on Linux, on the other hand, have always beaten Win32 apps for responsiveness in both startup times and runtime performance on every machine I have ever owned.
Where most of the "Linux runs apps faster than Windows" claims are made refer to long running, system intensive processes. This becomes more painfully obvious the longer applications, such as server processes, are left running. I have never experienced a case where similar long running applications haven't seen Linux completely smoke Windows.
This has come up more than once on Linux Today. The general consensus is that Microsoft is funding a Linux site, and that everyone Microsoft is trying to target on that site has already used Windows extensively and decided to use Linux instead.
No amount of Microsoft lies on that site will change that. I would have that that Dave would have spent more time on Linux Today, and would have already realized this. It's just free money for Linux Today.
Slashdot Mirror
"That being said I rarely call tech support for anything other then my ISP is broken."
Same here, but here's my experience:
Me: My internet access breaks at your routers. Can you fix the problem?
DirecWay: What operating system are you using? Let's check your settings.
Me: It's not my operating system. Your routers are dead.
DirecWay: What operating system are you using? Let's check your settings.
Me: It's not my....-sigh-...fine....Mandrake Linux.
DirecWay: What's that?
Me: It's an operating system.
DirecWay: I'm sorry, we only support Windows [many versions]. We can't help you with other operating systems.
Me: It's not my operating....-sigh-....fine, hold on while I [pretend to] switch to Windows [some arbitrary version I don't have].
DirecWay: [pretending to guide me through something useful, and me pretending to follow through on my phantom Windows computer].
Me: [after a lot of wasted time]. See, there is nothing wrong with my computer.
DirecWay: [after putting me on hold for ten minutes] Our senior technicians have determined that our routers are malfunctioning. They should be back online shortly.
Me: No shit....
"Please name an application in which compositing gives a better user interface than tabs or just overlapping windows."
That's easy. I created a visual database schema designer which has a table search function (columns too, but no need to go into details) that brings up a non-modal window with all the possible matches in a tabular format. Clicking on one of the items in the list causes the corresponding table to center on screen and flash a few times. If the table centers behind the results window, then the table is hidden and the flashing can't be seen. A translucent results window would solve that problem better than anything else.
"You see, in American English, you have only one word for Indians...."
Americans have lots of words for Indians and Native Americans, but all but two are very unkind.
I'm amused that you use two English terms in the language you say has only one to say that we have only one term.
I agree with you that these movies were bad (not the worst, but just bad):
The Cat In The Hat
Practical Magic
Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle
I haven't seen many of the movies on your list, so I won't comment on those.
Batman & Robin may have been cheesy, but it wasn't even remotely close to the worst movie ever.
The honor for the worst movie I've ever paid to see (and that was a rental, but they still should have paid me for the pain they induced by agreeing to let me see it), and may qualify for the single worst movie ever (Gigli can't hold a candle to it) is The Blair Witch Project.
Never has so much mindless, blaring (rhyming pun intended), exruciating, horrendously unnecessary mental pain been inflicted upon a living consciousness by another.
During either the DeCSS suit, the DMCA hearings, or a RIAA/MPAA suit (I can't remember which), the court specifically ruled that computers were not playback and recording devices and thus did not fall into the realm of protected devices for fair use copying.
Either computers are not such devices as the court ruling indicated, and thus this money grab is illegal, or computers are such devices and thus protected by fair use copying exemptions to the chagrin of the RIAA/MPAA.
I know I'm going to get modded down for this, but I have karma to burn.
Mr. Brown is an adult, I presume. As an adult, he is capable of reading and comprehending the basic language that appears in employment agreements. If he is at all familiar with the I.T. field, then he is probably also aware that many employment contracts include a clause that says all ideas and products created by employees while employed at the company become the property of the employer.
Mr. Brown willingly signed this contract, presumably because he wanted the money the company was offering in exchange for his agreement. Being a consenting adult means that he has to abide by the agreement, for better or for worse. The company presumably upheld its part of the bargain by paying Mr. Brown what was promised to him.
As much as I sympathize with his situation, he knew what he was getting into when he signed that contract. Now he needs to be responsible for his actions.
In addition, I really can't believe how little sense this guy has. When the company threatened to sue him, he should have just agreed to describe his idea but then described it wrong. When his employer pointed out that the idea couldn't possibly work, he could have just looked shocked like he suddenly realized how much time he wasted on a failed idea.
Moreso, he should have just kept his mouth shut. If the entrepeneurs in the Slashdot crowd learn anything from this, understand that loose lips sink ships. If you have a great idea from which you intend to profit in the future, keep it to yourself. How many times do people have to be told this for it to sink in?
I understand, as a developer, the desire to share strokes of brilliance with other people. As a businessman (sole proprietorship), I also understand the even greater need for discretion and personal responsibility.
"The guy knew his boss fucked around on the computer all day...."
This really tickled my funnybone, as you seem to misunderstand the nature of the supervisor-subordinate relationship. Allow me to clarify:
The supervisor tells the subordinate what is acceptable computer use, not the other way around -- regardless of what is contained in the policy manual.
If the policy manual says that no games shall be played on the computers, then you (the subordinate) don't play games on the computers. If your boss is playing games on the computers, and tells you to fuck off since he's your boss and doesn't have to give a shit about your whiney-ass opinion of his breach of policy, then you do as you're told (and document it for later use).
If you still feel the need to poke your nose into your boss's activities, then you start complaining up the chain of command and documenting everything you do.
If all this still doesn't bring down painful retribution upon your supervisor, then you just live with it and go back to doing your job. Just to be clear about it, installing spyware on your boss's computer is not part of your job.
Authority to do this stuff flows from your boss (or his bosses) down to you. Remember, your boss does not get his power to rule from the people he rules. He gets his power from his bosses, all the way up the chain to the elected office holders (since this story is about State offices, this holds true). Only the top of the chain is empowered by the people s/he governs.
This guy was a moron for not knowing when to stop. His actions were defensible only up to the point where he tried to reverse the chain of authority and to be his boss's boss.
"If somebody said something similar of IE there would be a unanimous uproar of upbraids from the slashdot community against whoever said it."
Yep, you are absolutely right. We would be blasting IE from every (virtual) rooftop.
That this bug was hidden away in the Bugzilla annals for over 4 years as Confidential is really intolerable. It reeks of trying to sweep an embarassing problem under the rug, which is the complete antithesis of Open Source development.
One of my coworkers who recently defected from I.E. to Firefox stated, upon the last Firefox vulnerability, that if he had to frequently upgrade his Firefox because of security issues, he may as well just stay with IE. And he unfortunately has a valid point.
If a person, or group, can't be mature enough to admit a big, "oops, I/we made a really big design mistake. We'll fix it because many people are depending on us," then that person or group has no business working on such a fundamentally important piece of software as a web browser.
A workable solution to this kind of problem has been around for many years. Java applets, when run from appletviewer, display a very prominent notice telling the user that very thing.
I hate Javascript with a passion, and disable it except for those crucial sites (broken as they are) that will not work without it. But for those sites, it's just common sense for the browser to to inform the user from within all Javascript popup windows that the window is a result of Javascript.
Actually, every user interface that is not a built-in part of the application should contain an unremovable notice (ala appletviewer) to make user interface spoofing (a very well known security risk) unworkable.
Okay, that's it. I warned them. I'm going to burn this place down.
"...the first time one of these smarmy nerds gets his ass handed to him by a pissed-off criminal, I'll definitely be feeling the urge to laugh a bit..."
Please, Brother Kothapalli Rao, don't be to upset. I am Father Dumb'en'dumber, and I have no idea what you're talking about.
That's all fine, but that isn't what he was asking. He was asking what makes the deb package format supposedly superior to the RPM package format.
Distribution policy, package availability, and the software the manipulates the packages have nothing to do with the package format's superiority or inferiority.
"If you recommend purchasing a computer that requires only half the support of the machine it is replacing, aren't you putting your job in danger? Exactly."
I usually agree with Cringely, but he's way off here. If you replace Windows with something requires half the support, you free resources to provide new and improved services in other areas.
Cringely is assuming that there is a fixed amount of services and support that can ever exist, and that IT departments have reached that peak. I can understand his error since when you're running Windows, you will never have the time or manpower to exceed a very minimal standard of services. You're so busy cleaning up after Windows when it shits all over itself and your data that improving the departmental offerings isn't even an option.
I talked my boss (actually Windows did the honor all by itself) into replacing Windows/IIS/ASP (which is all that dual-processor box did -- serve web pages) with Linux/Apache/PHP when Windows died for the millionth time, and the results were an eye-opener for the entire department. The Windows box pegged both processors at 100% after only a few simultaneous users connected to the web site, while the Linux box will sit largely idle with 50 or so simultaneous web connections).
Uptimes measured in hours under Windows turned (on the exact same, unmodified hardware) into 11 months (which is when the network card fried) under Linux.
I later added samba for file and print serving, and a PostgreSQL database for a variety of web related activities.
The former Windows web server required two of us programmers (because the techs are always busy fixing Windows problems) to babysit on an almost continuous basis. I now manage the web server (and two other highly utilized Linux servers) myself whenever I get a free couple minutes.
My time has since been spent creating new software services for my 600 internal users and the thousands of visitors that visit our web site every day.
My point is that there will -always- be higher levels of services that a department can offer when its people are not buried under trivial nonsense like constantly changing baby Windows' diaper.
"This is not a Microsoft exploit, just a trojan that targets MS products."
That isn't the best logic I've ever read.
The trojan worm (new term, I know; get over it) targets a Microsoft application, which encourages malware distribution through a well known entry vector caused by a well known defective Microsoft design, running on a Microsoft operating system. How exactly is this not a Microsoft exploit?
1) Back when I was running Win95, a Thanksgiving day virus wrote German gibberish into my FAT table. The silver lining is that was the day I switched to Linux.
/temp.
:)
2) The standard rm party. I thought I was one directory level higher (in a temp directory) than I was. "rm -rf *" from / instead of from
3) Second day on my new job programming in county I.S. for a truly aweful database called UniVerse (which I had never heard of before).
UniVerse calls directories "files" and calls files "records". I, having referred to files as "files" for so many years, maintaining the industry standard references of files being files (and not directories), that I always got the references confused. All database "records" in UniVerse are stored under "files". To delete a UniVerse "record", you type "delete [UniVerse_file] [UniVerse_record]". That deletes the file from the subdirectory.
UniVerse also has a command called "delete.file", which deletes entire directories (where databases live).
I had lost track of the difference between the two, typed "delete bp [some_record]" (the bp directory is where the jail database lived), and thought I had deleted the database. I immediately told my supervisor that I thought I just deleted the entire jail database. He assured me I didn't, and that we had backups of everything anyway, so I kept working.
Not more than ten seconds later, I type "delete.file bp [some_record]". I once again immediately went to my supervisor, who was talking to the department director, and told him what I had done and that I thought I had deleted the database.
"Yep," he confirmed, "it's gone. It'll take a couple hours to restore from tape."
About a half hour later, he came to my desk and told me he just found out that backups had been failing for the last month. Everything was gone.
I naturally thought it was time to once again start passing out the resumes. Since that was the highest paying job I'd ever had that I didn't hate, and was only my second job out of college, I was devastated at the prospect that I had lost it on only my second day. I could feel the tears welling up, and I could have burst out crying if I'd had just a little less self control.
I forgot to tell you that a brand new county jail was finishing construction, and this software had to go live in the near future (I can't remember the exact timeline).
That's when the director told me a couple things:
1) They had only been writing code for the new system for two days. The changes were modifications to a 3rd party package, so it would only take a couple days to get back on track.
2) Shit happens, don't worry about it.
3) "I bet you'll never make that mistake again." (truer words have never been spoken).
4) You fucked it up, so you fix this part of it (my first major assignment, small as it was, in a system I had never seen before).
The system went online as scheduled, I kept my job, everything worked out. Part of the reason I kept my job was because of my honesty in immediately bringing my mistake to their attention rather than making them hunt down the problem. Apparently my predecessor would always deny everything, even when the evidence of fault was conclusive. Another part is that I worked under one of the coolest department directors ever.
As an aside, I spun the situation into my having done the department a favor. "Without me, you may not have found out about the defective backups until something crucial had been lost. I uncovered the problem early."
"4. Taking over an NT domain accidentally by running samba as a PDC"
I had forgotten to turn off Samba when I installed one of our first Linux servers onto our then all-Windows network. It took a while to figure out why things had changed and started working reliably.
Samba has been handling our Windows networking ever since.
I'll do the select first, as you suggest, since I learned that lesson at the BASH command prompt with ls vs. rm.
Then once I'm sure that I have the conditions right, I do this:
It's saved me once, and it wouldn't have been a big loss it I hadn't used the transaction, but it drove home the point in my head.
Sometimes I think a transactional filesystem would be a great thing to have if it were implemented correctly.
"But Win9X is the big accident, oh yes ;-)"
Linux will let root do any dumb thing with a computer that you could ever conceive.
Windows will do it for you automatically.
Gates told journalists that Microsoft's patching process compares well with competitors'. "You know, the time -- the average time -- to fix on an operating system other than Windows is typically ninety to a hundred days," said Gates. "Today we have that down to less than forty-eight hours."
And in a matter of only a few years after that, Microsoft releases the fix that fixes the things the original fix breaks.
"Witches were herbalists, spiritualists, natural healers, and all around wise women. They do not, and have never consorted with the devil."
The original poster wasn't claiming this. He was listing a bunch of bogus arguments used by oppressors to justify their oppression, which he points out after the list.
Now they want 93,000,000 more?
Here's the really aggravating part: for $93M, I can put together a team of 100 (programmers, artists, technical writers, etc) dedicated to nothing but getting a fully functional, 100% customized to Stanford's business flow requirements, ERP system written and debugged in under a year. Each person would walk away with enough money to be very well off for quite a long time.
Whomever spent this much money with nothing to show should be dragged through the streets by rabid horses; and then bad things should happen to him.
Given Shakespeare's rampant lawyer bashing in his plays, I'm highly doubtful he completely changed his tune for this one quote.
The quote was given in the play as a description of the ideal community if one were king. Part of that ideal is to kill all the lawyers.
It was hardly a flattering remark about lawyers being some type of defenders of justice. It was just the opposite: lawyers cause the injustice, and getting rid of them would return justice.
I don't know if this is a legend, but I have read that, according to the formulas used by aerospace engineers, a bumblebee can't fly.
It's a popular old myth that science ever held that bumble bees shouldn't be able to fly. Read this
As others have pointed out, KDE and GNOME are heavier because most users have demanded extra heavyweight features. KDE has gotten lighter and more featureful between 3.1 and 3.2 (and I understand GNOME has had similar trimming). Mandrake 10.0 with KDE 3.2 runs better on my laptop than Mandrake 9.1 and KDE 3.1. Application startup time is better and resource usage is down.
For those of you who don't want all the extra goodies provided by KDE or GNOME, at least some distributions (Mandrake and Redhat that I use myself) provide a handy desktop switching tool that lets you easily switch to a lightweight (with correspondingly fewer features) window manager.
I make good use of KDE features, especially with Konqueror. I am endlessly frustrated by the user hostility of Microsoft Windows (and others) when I can't split the file manager into multiple panes for easy manipulation of files across directories and other networked computers within the same window.
That by itself is a killer feature that I am loathe to have unavailable.
I don't know of anyone who claims that KDE or GNOME are snappier desktops than Windows desktops, as that is easily disproved (but only if you're talking about application startup time).
Raw X11 apps on Linux, on the other hand, have always beaten Win32 apps for responsiveness in both startup times and runtime performance on every machine I have ever owned.
Where most of the "Linux runs apps faster than Windows" claims are made refer to long running, system intensive processes. This becomes more painfully obvious the longer applications, such as server processes, are left running. I have never experienced a case where similar long running applications haven't seen Linux completely smoke Windows.
This has come up more than once on Linux Today. The general consensus is that Microsoft is funding a Linux site, and that everyone Microsoft is trying to target on that site has already used Windows extensively and decided to use Linux instead.
No amount of Microsoft lies on that site will change that. I would have that that Dave would have spent more time on Linux Today, and would have already realized this. It's just free money for Linux Today.